In six months, dad, you’re probably going to lose your kids for good. I think you do suspect this, but won’t admit it to yourself. And you don’t want me to tell you why. They’ve been gone a year already, yet you don’t really want to know why.

I can tell this because you make it extremely unpleasant to interact with you. That is what scammers do. When you’re in a situation where you have some power, this may be very effective. It’s called bullying. People want to avoid the conflict, so maybe they get nervous and don’t scrutinize you appropriately, and your bad check or stolen credit card is accepted. Or maybe they give you the refund you want, even without the required receipt, so you’ll go away. But you are not in a one-on-one conflict. Your adversaries are not your equals, and they have very little duty toward you. You are fighting a court and a powerful government agency, backed closely by the police. Your arguments are worth nothing against that. And I’m your only friend in the fight. You shouldn’t want to make me avoid you.

Yet you make it miserable to talk with you, so I do the minimum. I’m just your lawyer; all I have to do is give you adequate legal advice and make sure you don’t get screwed legally. You decide what to do with that. Confronting you with stuff about yourself that you don’t want to hear, well, that goes beyond adequate. I didn’t have the energy or the time yesterday to deal with you arguing and yelling at me for an hour, which is the minimum it would have taken to have even a small chance of getting this through to you. So I’m in that gray area where I know I did my job, butI still feel bad because I know you’ll still fail. I don’t like my clients to lose, even when they’re assholes.

And that is the number one reason why the social worker will not recommend you getting your kids back and the court will follow that recommendation, regardless of what your lawyer argues at trial, regardless of what complaints about the system you have when you take the stand against your lawyer’s advice and ramble on over sustained objections. ( “Motion to strike after ‘Yes.'” “Sustained. SUSTAINED. That means the witness needs to STOP TALKING.” Bailiff approaches menacingly.)

There are a few reasons, and they build on each other to create something we call the totality of circumstances. In summary:

1) You’re a hothead.

2) You’re a hothead who smokes pot.

3) You’re a hothead who smokes pot and has a criminal background, and misses lots of drug tests and skips lots of scheduled visits with your kids because of things that are always someone else’s fault, and is 30 and has never held a job, and has absolutely no shame about telling a social worker that you need your children back so you can get the welfare turned back on. You make this demand to a social worker in your children’s mother’s publicly subsidized Section 8 apartment, where you shamelessly acknowledge that you live illegally because your criminal background precludes you from living there, but there’s no way anyone’s gonna come between you and her. NO WAY! GOT THAT? And during this conversation, your video game station is turned on. Yes, you have a video game system, a newish one, while you are moaning that you have to sell plasma to get by and have no time to do your weekly drug tests and visit your kids AND go to rehab classes three days a week.

If that’s too complicated, I’ll boil it down further: You are the kind of person that taxpaying citizens consider the scum of the earth. When you’re that kind of person, you don’t get to smoke marijuana and parent, even though the voters of California have (graciously! compassionately!) empowered a doctor to defy federal law and grant you a certificate that protects you from criminal conviction for possession (and he/she can do this for virtually any ailment you claim, even if it’s something ridiculous like having eating problems when you’re obviously obese).

And your children are under the control of a system that can, and does, kick parents like that out of their children’s lives permanently. Even when the kids love them and want to go home, like yours do. Under the law, you don’t have to beat your kids to lose them. You just have to be, well, crappy. Legally, it’s called “the nexus,” meaning a connection between substance use and risk of harm to the children. But what the nexus often means is, “you’re crappy, so you don’t get to.”

General crappiness, coupled with almost any illegal activity or use of a mind-altering substance, is enough. That’s the real trouble with medical marijuana. It’s not the bulletproof vest people think it is, not when you have kids. And that’s the problem with you, dad. You either can’t see, or refuse to see, that you’re one of those people whose ice is too thin to stomp around on. I wish I could figure out how to explain it so you’d understand. Lots of crappy people love their kids, and their kids love them back. But the law won’t protect both your family, and your way of life.

I’ve got a number of friends on Facebook today who have jumped on the question of “why is [insert media outlet name here] ignoring Ron Paul in their Iowa Straw Poll coverage when he took second?” It seems that there are a number of people who, if not being Ron Paul supporters, are at least giving Ron Paul a look (and seeing the tone of his media coverage as something sinister) after his performance in the latest debate.

Looking at his positions over at On The Issues, there are some things I can appreciably get behind. Of course, there are also things that it’s hard to get behind as well, at least for a number of people. Still, I suspect that for a number of the positions he takes, Ron Paul at least carries the same positions as some of the other groups – Tea Partiers, Republicans, Democrats and his actual home party, Libertarians.

Why, then, would media outlets not want to bother covering him? Well, for one, a Straw Poll is completely nonscientific. It’s not a ballot-box primary. It’s not even a caucus. It’s a matter of figuring out how to bus your supporters in, drive them in, or convince them to show up and either pay their $30 ticket or convince them to pay for it themselves. According to the indicated figures, there were ~4000 people who took tickets provided by the Bachmann camp and voted for somebody else. I’m willing to bet a good number of them went over to the Ron Paul camp.

Second, Ron Paul’s supporters have a reputation for being a little… ahem… cuckoo. As in, they have a history of hijacking straw polls and unscientific, uncontrolled online polls and making a mockery of them, even using hijacked computers to spam online polls. In many ways, the Ron Paul supporters remind me of the Lyndon LaRouche supporters who used to pop up in various places on the SoTech campus trying to sell buttons, coffee mugs, reading material, and above all else, entry into the Cult of LaRouche. In 2004 and 2008, LaRouche supporters heckled the Democrat party debates before being escorted out of the auditorium; in the last debate, the Fox “chatroom” for the online stream was so spammed by Ron Paul supporters that no other discussion other than “why isn’t every question directed at Ron Paul” could be had.

The sum total of this is that I don’t really think the media are giving Ron Paul a disservice or failing in their duty by not giving him wall-to-wall coverage. Ron Paul’s been in the position of “winning straw polls, never gaining real traction” before. His supporters are highly motivated, more than enough to spam and tip straw polls and unscientific online polling. At the same time, they aren’t very numerous, and we eventually have to look at what they are selling – Ron Paul.

Here’s where it all falls apart. Ron Paul, while sincere, is sincere in the same manner that makes people look at the Lyndon LaRouche crowd, or the Al Sharpton crowd, or the Tea Party, or any other fringe movement and say “wow, there goes a nutcase.” He’s almost an octegenarian, but he can go into incredibly manic periods during interviews. He may make some good points, but he has a habit of making them in the worst possible way – that “blowback principle” audioclip, where his voice went squeaky/creepy, was on talk radio stations for months afterwards.

At the end of the day, they’re selling “Crazy Uncle Ron in the Tinfoil Hat.” And few people are buying, media coverage or not.

Will’s post regarding the Hellspawn reminded me of something I haven’t thought of a lot in recent memory, save for an incident out a couple weeks ago when I was verbally savaged for using the “r-word” (for the uninitiated, there is a major movement to treat the word “retard” the same as the N-word; since the site speaks for itself, I offer a balancing opinion from the Washington post).

My precise wording: “in American classrooms, class proceeds at the pace of the slowest retard.” The person in the discussion who took offense, took great offense because she has a brother who is “developmentally challenged” and she really, really, really doesn’t like the use of that word.

In the larger scope, however, I refer back to my 3rd grade English class. In my grade school, we had a couple of “developmentally challenged” individuals. Not enough to constitute their own classroom, as Will had in his day minding the Hellspawn; instead, there was a special-ed teacher on staff for them who had them most of the day. To “innovate” around the difficulties of minding them (she couldn’t eat during normal lunch periods, instead having to mind her charges at the “special table” in the cafeteria/gym), the school decided to kill three birds with one stone. Bird #1 was that she needed a special lunch period. Bird #2 was that when she was eating, someone else had to “mind the hellspawn.” Bird #3 was that, due to state regulations, each of them had to spend “one class period with age-appropriate peers for socialization.”

In other words, the class period right after lunch was when her charges were farmed out to the other teachers of the school, dropped into their classes for “socialization” while the special ed teacher ate her lunch.

My 3rd grade year, we got “Ricky.” Ricky was one of the types who if you put his problems into a neat dossier, would doubtless generate sympathy. His parents were poor. Kenny McCormick-level poor. He was one of several (as in, “poor people who don’t get the idea of birth control or are religiously opposed to it” numerous) children, at least half of which were also “developmentally challenged.” He had physical deformities in addition to mental, deformities which if you got him to “smile for the camera” would, again, lead towards a sympathy reaction. His level of developmental problems meant that most of the day, he was barely doing preschool-level tasks instead of 3rd-grade tasks. He really, really liked the stuffed animals his parents tended to give him (rather than giving him breakable toys or anything that could be used as a weapon). It is not impossible, and indeed quite likely, that his health and development problems and those of his siblings were related to or exacerbated by the fact that his mother was a chain-smoker and alcoholic who had neither refrained from, nor limited, her usage of either during any of her pregnancies.

What the dossier would leave out is the following: he fit the definition of “hellspawn” almost perfectly. He was verbal without being understandable, communicating in a combination of grunts, groans, moans, and screams. He had severe impulse control issues, in that he had no impulse control at all. He would, when feeling balked or ignored, throw temper tantrums that involved physical violence with the strength of body that somehow seems to be a trademark of certain “developmentally challenged” individuals who never, ever, ever hold back from maximum. He had a predilection for throwing things – HARD. The stuffed animals didn’t really hurt. The hardcover books he liked to throw more, did. He was not above biting, and did in fact bite our teacher on at least two occasions hard enough to draw blood. He was such a disruption that for purposes of our English class over the course of that year, we probably got through 20% of what we were supposed to get through, and that only because after the second biting incident, the school actually did manage to remove him from the socialization aspect and found a teacher (the gym teacher, it turned out) who they could assign to watching him 1-on-1 during the time the special ed teacher was getting her lunch. His “socialization time” the remainder of the year was limited to the gym teacher keeping a 1-on-1 eye on him during recess periods, where he generally ran in circles off to one side while everyone else was on the playground equipment.

Admittedly, Ricky is an extreme case. However, when confronted with people who in the educational system insist that “mixing classes” is the “fair way” to get scores up and insist that the slower kids will “learn from the advanced kids”, I cannot help but remember the year my English class was saddled with Ricky, and the fact that even with lesser students in the class who are not such extreme cases, class must necessarily move at the “pace of the slowest retard” and one sufficiently disruptive student can ruin the school year for up to 29 other kids.

It’s pretty cool that we’ve advanced to the point where a 40-year-old woman can still make it as a bimbo. It’s great that I’m able to have this argument without being accused of being an old hag picking on some 25-year-old. Lara Logan is 40!

Society, medical care, nutrition, and makeup sure have come a long way.

Please, commenters, criticism should be informed of the entire post and supporting links. I refuse to be exhausted by repetition. Comments that force me to repeat prior statements, or that are personally abusive, or that praise her without adding to the debate, will be deleted. Those are all typical tricks of the crazed (male) Logan fans who scan the Internet for criticism of her. I left the No. 2 comment up as a good example.

Finally got around to reading the transcript of Lara Logan’s CBS “60 Minutes” interview about her alleged, fishy “brutal and sustained sexual assault” in Tahrir Square. Sorry, I’ve got kids. They take up time. And I knew this would really piss me off. It’s even worse than I thought. Lara Logan is cold scheming evil, in a “To Die For”/”Wild Things” kind of way.

Before I get to the worst con she’s pulled, by the way, know who doesn’t have kids? Lara Logan. She has one child. [Edit: A kind commenter draws my attention to the fact that her Wikipedia bio is not up to date, and she apparently popped out two kids one year after the other. She must have an indulgent boss. The facts as to her adulterous, suspiciously well-timed “accidental” pregnancy, however, are correct.] So why did she keep going on how she kept thinking of her “children”during this unwitnessed (and counter-witnessed!), so-called brutal sexual attack? Well, you see, Logan has a stepdaughter. When Logan got pregnant with her one and only child, her current husband was married to another woman. That’s the woman whose husband she stole’s child, not Logan’s. That girl’s mother is still alive, you know, notwithstanding that when she got the news of Logan’s very convenient “accidental” pregnancy (yeah, sure, a childless late-30s professional having an affair with a married man gets “accidentally” pregnant with his baby she keeps) she reportedly went to the hospital with an overdose. I wonder how that poor woman feels watching this cheater claim her daughter on national TV. The underling reporter who did the interview surely knew Logan’s biographical details, so when he said “your daughter and your son,” that had to be at her instruction.

Such a well-timed interview, so well-calculated for one last big burst of public sympathy and publicity. Done just when Logan’s first fix of publicity had died down, and she’d almost been eclipsed by real, honest reporter/assault victims like Lynsey Addario. No Obama phone call for Addario, though. No poster-girl status. And … not a single person questioning or disputing Addario’s credible, unsensationalized account of her mistreatment at the hands of her Libyan captors. And conveniently done just as Logan, whose only real professional asset is her appearance, turns 40 — getting very close to the age of the superior but older female reporter who was fired for her several years ago. Suddenly, women feel we have to sympathize with Logan.

Frankly, it’s scary that CBS would let this go on. What happened to critical reporting? What happened to “If your mother says she loves, you, check it out?” It just doesn’t seem to matter that there were eyewitnesses who dispute Logan’s account — and, more importantly, three months later, still not a single witness who supports it other than Logan herself. Not one supporting witness to support her claim that there was a 20 to 30 minute attack where chunks of hair were ripped out of her scalp, she was raped with hands (as she put it), and stripped naked in public. The only witnesses to any harassment at all, ironically, were people who said it didn’t appear that much was going on, at worst she may have been groped over her clothes, and she was protected by a chain of male volunteers. There were no women around when she got to the soldiers. Even without the disputing witness acounts, Logan’s counter-story just sounds like so much melodramatic Hollywood hogwash:

Logan: And I almost fell into the lap of this woman on the ground who was head to toe in black, just her eyes, I remember just her eyes, I could see.

Pelley: Wearing a chador.

Logan: Yes. And she put her arms around me. And oh my God, I can’t tell you what that moment was like for me. I wasn’t safe yet, because the mob was still trying to get at me. But now it wasn’t just about me anymore. It was about their women and that was what saved me, I think. The women kind of closed ranks around me.

Where are these saintly female saviors? How come there weren’t any witnesses interviewed for this segment, except a brief bit from her producer, who doesn’t seem to provide any support for the story except that Logan seemed very upset, like a “rag doll”? Why don’t we get to hear from “Ray,” the former special forces security guy who should be able to support her account of being stripped naked? All we get is Logan’s interviewer commenting that “Ray” said her sleeve was torn from her coat (probably by Ray himself, because he was supposedly holding that sleeve in a death grip). And how is it no one claims to have seen those cell phone photos Logan claims people were taking? Where is anyone who witnessed or took part in this gory, protracted attack and dramatic rescue?

Why did Scott Pelley ask Logan absolutely nothing about the fact that eyewitness accounts seem to dispute her story? It would have been so easy, and it could have been done without being mean. “You’ve probably heard that there were others in the square who claim they saw you there, and that it didn’t seem to them you were being sexually attacked.” I mean, they don’t have to actually interview Mexican photojournalist Temoris Grecko (and here’s his response to her interview, as well as to her crazed fans who wanted his head on a platter for reporting what he and others saw), but at least ask Logan something that gives her a chance to respond to his account of the incident, and the accounts of other eyewitnesses he quoted. It’s irresponsible not to give someone a chance to respond to that. Unless you know they don’t have a decent response.

Logan isn’t brave. She was treated with kid gloves in this interview, just as she’s been treated with kid gloves across the media. There’s nothing brave about a press release, and there’s nothing brave about keeping quiet for three months while the people you conned wring their hands over you, then telling your story your way to someone who won’t question a damned thing. It’s the most cowardly way she could have handled it. It’s the way someone acts when they’re lying.

Yes, Logan conned me and is still conning a lot of other people, and I’m frothing mad about it. So let’s go to someone who can discuss this unemotionally: “DC Dave,” (I found him at Female Faust’s post on the subject. We women do get emotional about sexual assault.) here:

Filming and reporting had gone just fine for about an hour before the camera battery went down, we are told for the first time. This is a convenient way of dealing with my question in part 1 as to why we had not been shown any pictures of what happened subsequent to the one picture we have been shown over and over of Logan looking concerned in the crowd’s midst. [Sheila says: I disagree that she looked concerned in that photo, she had a small smile and just appeared to be looking at something.]

They may have addressed the one-photo criticism—however implausibly—but they provide no explanation for their four-day reporting delay. They also have no explanation for the last-minute redundant coverage of the Tahrir Square celebration by 60 Minutes in this era of financial hardship by the news networks. CBS already had its live coverage of the event. What was the 60 Minutes story to have been in the absence of the “sexual assault?”

They do have an explanation as to how the group of rescuing Egyptian women came upon the scene. The attacking melee was somehow “swept along” until it encountered this knot of local women in the crowd. Only then, we are told, did things begin to change for the better.

What really cries out for better explanation in this new version of events is how the six-man crew failed so utterly to protect Logan. Before, with the “got separated” story, one could imagine terrible things perhaps happening to Logan that the crew knew nothing about. The scene as now painted, though, has the menace arriving with their full knowledge, and Logan, the one person the crew was there to guard, was somehow culled out by the mob. Had I been interviewing McClellan I would not have wanted so much to hear about Logan’s wounds; I would have wanted to hear about his wounds.

It is perhaps significant that the producer of this latest 60 Minutes piece was none other than Robert Anderson. This is the same person who, in the Vince Foster case, put the following complete lie into the mouth of Mike Wallace: “The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger.” (See the appendix to Part 6 of “America’s Dreyfus Affair.”)

…

Notice the contrast in journalistic professionalism between this account and what we have been told by CBS and the Murdoch news organs. Grecko names his witnesses and tells you something about each, making it easier to check his story out. CBS didn’t even give us the name of the hospital in New York City where Logan was supposedly sent for several days. It certainly makes you wonder if there really was any such hospital to name.

If [Temoris] Grecko’s is the correct account, which to this observer has a much greater ring of truth, what CBS did with its four-day reporting delay was not to hatch a story out of whole cloth, but to figure out a way to put their propaganda spin on the story. The real story would have done nothing for the larger mission of the U.S. mainstream press, which these days no doubt includes addressing the growing Zionist propaganda crisis …

My favorite line is the last:

A human chain of young men protecting the mildly harassed accused Israeli agent, Lara Logan, just wouldn’t do.

But it looks like Logan and CBS will all get away with it. The story tells too many people what they want to believe.

And that’s why CBS won’t fire her, even if a big media outlet finally picks up the real story and she’s exposed. Her superiors were in on it.

Slate is running a series this week on cases where the justice system got it wrong; somewhat spurred by the Illinois legislation abolishing the death penalty, partly just a good conversation.

The author, Brandon L. Garrett, is a bit pimping his new book but is also providing a good look at two of the most widely believed – but at the same time not entirely reliable – types of evidence on which many criminal cases rely. The first is eyewitness accounts and identification, the second is the confession of guilt.

Now that we know—with the benefit of the DNA tests—that Sterling is innocent, one wonders how an innocent man could have guessed at incredibly specific crime scene details? Sterling later explained it this way: “They just wore me down.” “I was just so tired.” “It’s like, ‘Come on, guys, I’m tired—what do you want me to do, just confess to it?””

In a pair of videos I link to very often, there’s a great answer to how someone “knows unreleased details” – the cops slip them to the accused in one form or another, or lead the accused into guessing until they have them “guessing right” on tape.

More interestingly to me, however – Garrett finally comes up with some hard numbers. I’ve chided the Innocence Project before about this, because they make a habit of releasing only their “number of innocent people freed” number, rather than giving us the chance to see the total number of cases they’ve examined. Will has said – and I agree – that even this may not be an exact figure, since IP only takes cases “likely to exonerate” on their early examination before proceeding all the way down the line, but it at least would give us something to work with.

Garrett, however, gives us a gem.

In 16 percent of the first 250 DNA exonerations, or 40 of the 250 cases I studied for my book, Convicting the Innocent, innocent defendants confessed to crimes they did not commit. (Additional DNA exonerees did not deliver confessions in custody, but they made incriminating statements or pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit).

The false confessions pose a puzzle. All but two of the 40 DNA exonerees who falsely confessed were said to have confessed in detail.

Now, this is not perfect. His study is only on those cases that are proven false convictions. But we at least have a hard number here – 250 cases of proven innocent, 40 cases of false confession, 38 of which are said to be an “in depth” confession. And every one proven innocent almost-definitively by DNA evidence. This leads to at least a reasonable suspicion that confessions in districts across the nation are contaminated or even coerced by the cops – perhaps by cops who don’t know what they are doing, or perhaps by the type of behavior we commonly associate with not-so-honest cops who start and stop the recording on TV shows, only recording the parts of the interview they want to be available in court.

The Sacramento Kings are apparently moving to Anaheim. Kris Hughes apparently thinks that this is doomed to failure because the Kings are failing, the Clippers aren’t really succeeding, and LA has enough teams.

As I have mentioned previously, I think that the professional sports leagues are past-due for an expansion and I think that expansion includes second and third teams in some cities. But I find it hard to disagree with Hughes on this. My only criticism* is that they’re really less a third Los Angeles team and more an Anaheim team. When it comes to baseball and basketball, intra-city regional designations matter. The teams play 82 or 162 games a year. It’s not like football where it’s worth driving two hours from Milwaukee to Green Bay or making the trek from New York to New Jersey is going to be worth it because it’s one of only 16 games, all of which are somewhat important (albeit not important enough). Accessibility matters more because you need fans to come out to more games. Really, it seems to me that the Clippers ought to be moving out to Anaheim rather than pulling in a team from somewhere else.

It’s also worth noting that football, baseball, and basketball have different fan dynamics more generally. Baseball, due in part to the sheer number of games, needs to be in as major of urban areas as possible. And so when you look at the MSAs, it’s easily baseball that sticks most to the most urban of areas. In football, you don’t need population so much as a fanatical fanbase. So Green Bay (with some help from Milwaukee), Buffalo, New Orleans, and Jacksonville get teams while they’re not big enough to in (most) other sports. Revenue-sharing has also probably played a role in Buffalo continuing to host the Bills. Basketball, on the other hand, tends to do really well where there is little competition**. Some of the smallest cities to host professional sports, such as Salt Lake City and Oklahoma City, do well enough with an NBA team (and the NBA touched ground first on cities that have since gotten teams in other sports). But erstwhile middle-large cities with teams in the other major sports, such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, go without.

Los Angeles (and Anaheim) is(/are) famously without a football team, but they have two baseball teams, two other basketball teams, two hockey teams, and a lot of other things to do. It does seem like a stretch. I would think a greater likelihood of success in some other area without other teams. Or, if you really want to be in a large city with other sports teams, San Diego remains the largest city in the country without a team in each of the three major sports.

But I guess Los Angeles has its own appeal. I wonder, to some extent, whether this is at all related to the Angels’ attempts to disown Anaheim in favor of being the most awkwardly-named team in professional sports since the Bossier City/Shreveport Battle Wings. Who wants to be associated with some bush league city when you can be associated with Los Angeles!!. Or, since they would be calling themselves the Anaheim Royals*** rather than Los Angeles somethings-or-other.

* – Okay, I would also criticize the notion of the Dodgers as a “national team.” The Raiders, too, though they were more of a national team when they were in Los Angeles. I’m not sure of causation there, though, because Bo Jackson helped a lot with that.

** – The NBA has six teams in cities without any of the other Big Three (seven if you include Orlando), the NFL has three (four if you include Green Bay), and Major League Baseball has none.

*** – I have to think that they’re the Royals to avoid confusion with the Los Angeles Kings hockey team. One wonders how St. Louis managed to have two Cardinals at the same time.

Over on youtube, there’s a video from a school in Australia, of a kid who fights back against a bully. A website covers it here in a lot of depth. The Daily Mail covers it as well… including what I find outrageous, that the stupid idiots in charge of the school suspended both Casey and the bully for four days.

Why does this piss me off? Because the bully is clearly trying to start a fight. Casey doesn’t throw the first punch… or even the first several. The bully has two of his friends there to “back him up.” Even after the one bully is taken care of, the others are there trying to step in and pull Casey into another fight.

And if you listen to the audio and read some of the other coverage, you find out that the attack was brought on by the fact that Casey had tried to report the ongoing bullying to school officials. They were attacking him specifically to try to make him shut up and not report their behavior. A subtitled version (rechecked) makes it clear:

When I was younger, I went through situations precisely like this. Cornered “out of sight” of the teachers (who didn’t WANT to be involved because it meant paperwork and potential lawsuits for them no matter which kid “won”), then physically attacked. There was no video to show what happened to me. After defending myself against a worthless shit of an F-level student who didn’t care if he went in and out of detention on a revolving door schedule, I found myself in a 3-day suspension from our fuckwit of a vice principal who believed “there’s no such thing as a bully” and who demanded my parents see about “counseling” me for being in a fight rather than “walking away” (where the FUCK was I supposed to get to, being cornered by 3 kids?) or “calling for help” (which I had done, but no teacher responded until I was already physically attacked). I failed a test based on in-class handouts in science class because I wasn’t given the study materials by the science teacher, who said “students who miss class don’t get the handouts so there” (despite the fact that if you were out sick, he’d have it prepared for you when you got back).

I applaud Casey. I agree wholeheartedly with this comic. It takes a lot to stand up to a group of bullies, especially when it’s 3 on 1.

Oh, and to Tina Gale, the crocodile-tear-spewing mother of the bully who got what he deserved: I am sorry you inflicted your genes on the next generation by spawning that reprehensible bully. Now grow the hell up and change the way you’re raising your brat.

It looks like the fishy CBS press release about Lara Logan’s “brutal and sustained sexual assault” was indeed a lie. Finally, we have an account from some actual witnesses. Temoris Grecko blogged about what he and others saw:

I was buying tea from a vendor in Tahrir with two friends, Amr Fekry, a 26 year old Egyptian call center agent, and Andi Walden, a San Francisco political science student. Then we heard the noise and saw the mob coming. A blonde woman, neatly dressed with a white coat, was being dragged and pushed. It didn’t seem to me she was panicking, but rather trying to control the situation. They passed us in an moment. They were yelling “agent!, agent!”

I tried to run to intervene, but some Egyptians I didn’t know prevented me from doing it. There was nothing I could do and, as a foreign journalist, I’d surely end up being accused of being an agent too, and attacked. Fekry did go there and dissapeared into the crowd, 50 or 100 people strong.

Later I spoke with two young male activists who helped the person I later learned was Lara Logan (I didn’t know her before, I don’t usually follow US networks). They were Omar El Shennawy, a 21 year old teacher of English, and Abdulrahman Elsayed, a 25 year old teacher of physical education. They said they had formed a human chain with other young men to protect Logan, and then delivered her to the Egyptian Museum military post.

When I read CBS’s story and it’s interpretation by other media outlets, I felt troubled. It seemed misleading. “It didn’t make sense to me”, said Benjamin Starr, from Boston who arrived as a tourist on January 24th, and stayed to witness the uprising. He also saw the mob pass by with Lara Logan. “I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe something happened in another part of the square, but from what I saw, she was being taken by men to the soldiers, and her clothes were not torn off. There were no women, I didn’t see a single woman in the crowd around her.”

So basically, Logan got roughed up like a hundred other unremarked-on reporters in the area around that time. But for having the bad taste to bear witness to the facts (and against precious Lara’s claim to specialness) Grecko got attacked as a “yellow journalist” by white knight/pretty boy/nepotism hire* Dan Abrams: “Lara Logan Attacked Again, This Time By Yellow Journalists.”

… There is no doubt. It is a fact that Logan was hospitalized with severe injuries. Not a theory, not an allegation not a claim, but a fact. Because Grecko and Starr did not actually see the attack itself and other “activists” with whom Grecko claims to have spoken, did not witness it (or more likely don’t want to believe it), he questions whether it was sexual in nature and whether it happened at all.

A “fact” that she had “severe injuries?” Where does Abrams get this? All we know is Logan reportedly spent four days in a hospital. We have no idea why, and more importantly, we have no report or evidence that any injuries that did occur were sexual. As I noted in a previous post, it’s unlikely a hospital would turn away a woman of Logan’s wealth and fame if she felt the need to stay there for a few days claiming any type of attack.

And ironically, the accounts provided in Grecko’s story provide the only witness accounts of Logan’s attack that have appeared to date. Despite Logan’s claim of being rescued by women and soldiers, not a single person other than Logan herself has corroborated her account of her sexual attack.

Abrams goes on to call Grecko a “charlatan,” and to accuse him of discouraging women from reporting rape. Why, because potential rape claimants will read Grecko’s account and fear they, too, might be discredited by witnesses who saw it not happen? No, I have a lot more fear that underdog journalists like Grecko will be discouraged from reporting the facts because they fear being smeared by wealthy powerhouses like CBS and Abrams.

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*Abrams’ dad is Columbia constitutional law professor/rich lawyer Floyd Abrams, which probably helped Abrams when he was at Columbia law grooming for his career as a TV legal analyst.

It’s not just the lack of corroboration that makes me suspicious of Logan’s sexual assault claim. It’s her own reaction, or lack thereof. Forget the twaddle about sexual assault victims being too depressed and terrified to “come foward.” That may be the average victim. But Lara Logan is absolutely not average, and certainly not a timid, powerless little nobody who has to fear the police, idiot neighbors or sneering classmates. She is a wealthy, sophisticated 40-year-old woman who has spent 10 years in war zones, who saw a soldier’s leg blown off next to her in a tank, who has a huge machine of support behind her. She’s not your 12-year-old daughter. She’s not even you. She wasn’t embarrassed about the Baghdad Love Triangle, she wasn’t embarrassed about having the baby of a still-married man with a toddler, and she wouldn’t be embarrassed about this.

Lara Logan is clearly not one of those people who feels like bad treatment is her fault. And she may be a lightweight, she may be a bimbo, but she is not a weakling and does not lack confidence. No way do I buy that she’s too traumatized to talk. She talks for a living. She exposes other people — many much less wealthy and famous than she is — to public scrutiny for a living. And we’re just supposed to swallow the minimal misleading press release that has made her a household word, wish her well, and “respect her privacy?” Any self-respecting journalist would roll her eyes at the hypocrisy.

And if this really did happen to her, she is, above all else, furious. Ever talked to a real sex crime victim? They want heads on pikes. And they talk, oh yes, given an opportunity they will talk until their throat dries out. Even kids (I have seen them testify. “How did that make you feel?” Ten-year-old witness: “I want to punch him in the nose!”) They welcome the opportunity to bear loud and angry witness.

So why is none of that happening? She has one of the biggest voices in the world right now, and the perfect opportunity to help locate and punish her attackers, reward her rescuers, and focus attention on sexual harassment and assault of women, and female reporters, in Arab countries. Yet she refuses comment.

Here’s what CBS should have sent out immediately:

This evening [because we’re not going to conceal this news while a thousand other reporters are potentially in danger!], correspondent Lara Logan suffered [major? moderate?] injuries during a mob attack in Tahrir Square. Ms. Logan was attacked when she was separated from her crew and surrounded by a mob. She was rescued from further harm by a group of female Egyptian protesters and a group of Egyptian soldiers. Her injuries required hospitalization, for which she returned to the United States immediately.

I could see where it might take a few days to sort out and figure out how to handle the sexual battery element. Logan herself should have followed up with a clarifying statement, something along these lines:

“I want to thank the public for the outpouring of support and concern I have received regarding the incident at Tahrir. I also extend my gratitude to the brave Egyptian woman and soldiers who offered their assistance. I understand their have been rumors that the attack against me was sexual in nature. Those reports are true. I was surrounded by a mob, struck multiple times, had my two front teeth knocked out [I’m making that up for example — ST], and was grabbed and battered sexually and had my clothes torn. Thankfully, I was not raped, due to the intervention of those brave female protesters. They deserve the gratitude of their countrymen and ours.

Unfortunately, as many of us who cover foreign wars know, my experience is not unique. Many reporters have suffered similar attacks. Some were not as lucky as I was. In addition, the women of may of the countries we cover suffer worse fates every day. Women’s rights, yadda yadda yadda they should be treated a lot better, I only hope I’ve increased awareness so others may be helped etc. I and my producers are reviewing tapes of the square that night and will bring forward any leads we have to U.S. and Egyptian authorities, and will be very grateful for any assistance from the public in stringing up these bastards by their balls.” [I hate press releases, but you get the idea].

Yet for some reason, Logan is choosing to act like a fictional sexual assault victim. Precious, delicate, traumatized into silence. Recovering in private. Letting the concerned public assume the worst about her condition and her injuries. Stoking the buzz. Maybe she just doesn’t want to invite the scrutiny that the other approach — the real, angry, public approach — would bring.

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Update: Finally, some independent reporting, although it’s unsourced. The Times of London (through the NY Daily News, because it’s behind a paywall) indicates the mob actually attacked the entire crew, calling them spies and Israelis, and Logan was separated at that time. This should be extremely verifiable (so let’s hear from some named witnesses, dammit!). The attack doesn’t sound nearly as sexual in this story, however. Apparently some or all of her clothes were torn off, and she was beaten with fists and flagpoles, and suffered welts from “aggressive pinching.” Sounds pretty bad, but I’ll bet it’s not what all those sympathetic readers envisioned when they read “brutal and sustained sexual assault” in the CBS press release.